Category Archives: Space Station

The date of September 11 this year marked the 21st anniversary of the dastardly attacks that were carried out by Al-Qaeda terrorists on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In remembrance of the horrific event, NASA has shared a picture of the demolition of the buildings that were visible even from space.

These pictures were taken by NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson, who was commander of Expedition 3 aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and was the only American in the crew. When the planes were rammed into the Twin Towers, the space station was crossing New York City, which gave Culbertson the opportunity to document the event right after it occurred.

"The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked, the astronaut wrote in a public letter released the next day.

It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are."

To carry out the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Al-Quaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft. Out of the four, two crashed into floors 93 and 99 of the North and the South tower at 6:16 pm IST (8:46 am EST) and 6:33 pm IST (9:03 am EST) respectively. Estimates suggest that 2,977 people from 93 countries were killed in the attacks out of which 2,753 were in the towers. On the other hand, 184 lost their lives due to the plane that crashed into the Pentagon whereas 40 were killed in the fourth plane crash into a rural field in Pennsylvania.

To honour those who lost their lives, NASA flew nearly 6,000 4-by-6 inch flags on Endeavour's flight during the STS-108 mission which took off in December that year. The same flags were later handed over to the relatives of the victims.

Originally posted here:
NASA shares what 9/11 attacks on Twin Towers looked like from space; 'jolting to psyche' - Republic World

Enlarge / Artist's impression of low Earth-orbit satellites like those launched by SpaceX and OneWeb.

The Federal Communications Commission has a plan to minimize space junk by requiring low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to be disposed no more than five years after being taken out of service.

A proposal released yesterday by FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel would adopt "a first-ever rule requiring non-geostationary satellite operators to deorbit their satellites after the end of their operations to minimize the risk of collisions that would create debris." It's scheduled for an FCC vote on September 29.

The five-year rule would be legally binding, unlike the current 25-year standard that's based on a NASA recommendation proposed in the 1990s.

"Currently, it is recommended that operators with objects in LEO ensure that their spacecraft are either removed from orbit immediately post-mission or left in an orbit that will decay and re-enter Earth's atmosphere within no more than 25 years to mitigate the creation of more orbital debris. However, we believe it is no longer sustainable to leave satellites in LEO to deorbit over decades," the FCC proposal said.

The new rule "would require space station operators planning disposal through uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere to complete disposal as soon as practicable, and no more than five years following the end of mission," an FCC fact sheet on the draft order said. The plan includes "a grandfathering period of two years for the new requirement to reduce any potential burden on operators."

Satellites already in orbit will be exempt from the new requirement if it's approved as written. "For satellites already authorized by the Commission that have not yet been launched, we will provide a grandfathering period of two years, beginning on September 29, 2022, in order to allow operators to incorporate the five-year post-mission disposal requirement into their mission objectives," the FCC said.

The rule would apply to US-licensed satellites. It would also apply to operators of non-US licensed satellites if they seek US market access, for example, by providing broadband service to US residents.

It will be possible to get waivers from the five-year plan on a case-by-case basis, particularly for scientific research missions. The FCC proposal said NASA "expressed concern that a five-year limit would impact NASA Science Mission Directorate's (SMD's) CubeSat missions, which rely on natural decay of orbit to manage post-mission orbital lifetime and impose greater limits on acceptable launch opportunities." The five-year requirement "may be unduly burdensome" at certain altitudes, the FCC said.

SpaceX's Starlink broadband division, the biggest operator of LEO satellites, would apparently comply with the new rule without any changes to current operations. Lower altitudes help speed up disposal: When SpaceX sought permission to use altitudes of 540-570 km instead of the 1,110-1,325 km it originally obtained approval for, it told the FCC that deorbiting from this lower range can be done in months.

SpaceX said its deorbiting sequence from 540-570 km would consist of an "active" phase that takes a few weeks for each vehicle and a "passive" phase that lasts several weeks to months, "with the exact time depending on solar activity." In a worst-case scenario, the deorbiting would still take less than five years because of the lower altitude, SpaceX said:

While SpaceX expects its satellites to perform nominally and deorbit actively as described above, in the unlikely event a vehicle is unable to finish its planned disposal maneuver, the denser atmospheric conditions at the 540-570 km altitude provide fully passive redundancy to SpaceX's active disposal procedures. The natural orbital decay of a satellite at 1,110-1,325 km requires hundreds of years to enter the Earth's atmosphere, but the lower satellites will take less than five years to do so, even considering worst-case assumptions.

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan to cut altitudes in half partly because the lower altitudes would make it easier to prevent buildup of orbital debris. The new five-year rule would apply to satellites in Starlink's range and above, specifically to "space stations ending their missions in or passing through the low Earth-orbit region below 2,000 kilometers."

Describing the debris problem, the pending FCC proposal said:

Defunct satellites, discarded rocket cores, and other debris now fill the space environment creating challenges for future missions. Moreover, there are more than 4,800 satellites currently operating in orbit as of the end of last year, and the vast majority of those are commercial satellites operating at altitudes below 2,000 kmthe upper limit for LEO. Many of these were launched in the past two years alone, and projections for future growth suggest that there are many more to come.

Starlink has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000 satellites. While currently orbiting Starlink satellites are in the 540-570 km range, about 7,500 of its approved satellites would orbit from 335 km to 346 km. SpaceX is also seeking permission for 30,000 more satellites in altitudes ranging from 340 km to 614 km.

OneWeb is operating LEO broadband satellites at an altitude of about 1,200 km, with deorbiting plans reportedly calling for disposal timelines of five years or less. Amazon plans to launch a few thousand satellites in altitudes of 590 km, 610 km, and 630 km.

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FCC to fight space debris by requiring satellite disposal in 5 years or less - Ars Technica

A full moon rises over Beijing in May.Getty Images

China aims to launch three moon missions over the next decade as part of its Chang'e lunar program.

China's National Space Administration won approval for the missions after it found a new mineral.

The mineral, Changesite-(Y), could be a future source of energy and was found in lunar samples.

China is aiming to launch three unmanned missions to the moon after discovering a new lunar mineral that could be an energy source in the future.

The space race between China and the US is accelerating after Beijing's National Space Administration got the go-ahead to launch three orbiters to the moon over the next 10 years, it announced on Saturday. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.

It comes a day after China became the third country to discover a new lunar mineral, which it called Changesite-(Y), according to Chinese state-controlled newspaper the Global Times.

China's Chang'e-5 mission retrieved samples from the moon in 2020 and it has been described by Global Times as a "phosphate mineral in columnar crystal" found in lunar rock particles. The mineral contains helium-3, which could be a future source of energy.

The discovery may put more pressure on the US to ramp up its efforts after its Artemis I moon mission was postponed for a second time.

Moon mining could be the next source of tension between the countries as NASA is also probing the moon's south pole where China plans to build a research station in conjunction with Russia.

China has accelerated its efforts in space exploration of late by building a space station, launching a number of missions to collect moon samples and putting a rover called Zhurong on Mars earlier this year to rival NASA.

The US remains the only country to put astronauts on the moon, with the last landing almost 50 years ago in the Apollo 17 mission, according to NASA's website.

The US Apollo 11 mission was the first to bring samples from another planet back to Earth in July 1969, with about 49 pounds (22 kilograms) of material from the moon's surface.

China's National Space Administration was contacted for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Read more here:
China plans three missions to the Moon after discovering a new lunar mineral that may be a future energy source - Yahoo! Voices

Norfolk has experienced a lot of growth in the past 35 years, including the number of police officers and the way the city is patrolled.

We have found ourselves literally bursting at the seams, said Norfolk police chief Don Miller, who spoke at length about the space issues that the Norfolk Police Divisions headquarters has experienced. Millers comments came at an August meeting of the Norfolk City Council.

He noted how the police division has expanded in terms of employees and services. He also described the hallways at the station, where boxes and copier machines continue to pile up.

Norfolks police station was built in 1986 and moved into in 1987.

In 1990, Miller was hired at the Norfolk Police Division and has seen the building throughout the years.

Its always been a little tight, Miller said. When it was first built, it was designed to be economically feasible. They didnt build it for what they needed. They built it for the money they had available.

In the 1990s, the police division saw a sudden growth in numbers in terms of police officers. From that point on, space at the station became a gradually increasing problem.

For the past 20 to 25 years, weve really been noticing our crunch for space, Miller said. Its been a general conversation for all those years.

When Miller became police chief in 2019, he made it one of his priorities to address some of the challenges both with technology and the building itself. The topic of a police station expansion gained traction when Miller took over.

Theres not enough space, and theres only one shower for males, Miller said. For context, males make up a large part of Norfolks Police Division.

The room doesnt have space to do what we need to do. Oftentimes, people will go in there and take breaks and package evidence, Miller said. Sometimes I tell people, youre literally eating at the same place youre packaging drugs at. Of course, we clean it up, but thats still not a smart idea.

We store a lot of our weapons and supplies in that room. Weve outgrown it since theres boxes in the halls because theres no room, Miller said.

Evidence is on the second floor. Thats not a good place to put it since you have to carry heavy boxes up the stairs. Its just best to keep that stuff on the main floor, Miller said. Evidence has taken up many other closets and rooms as well as other storage areas we made available because we need to secure our evidence."

That space has been turned into our new dispatch center, Miller said. We dont have a classroom. Sometimes, well go to the fire station, library or a church thats offered us space.

Theres stuff thats spread out into different rooms because we dont have a proper room for it, Miller said.

The officers workstation is in a hallway. They have a counter on the wall with a bunch of computers, Miller said.

When the building was built, police didnt have a lot of computers. Since it was the 1980s, much of what officers did was handwritten. All you needed was a counter, and by those standards, that was OK.

Currently, the department does not have a proper area for holding juveniles. They can't place them in an adult jail, since they are minors. "There was one juvenile from Omaha whose family took 12 hours to get to Norfolk. They ended up taking a mattress from the jail, placed it in the hallway, had the child sleep on it, and an officer watched over him," Miller said. The new building plan has a juvenile holding center.

Miller also expressed how the exercise and custodial rooms are too small.

Weve just outgrown everything, Miller said. Hallways are lined up with boxes and supplies because we have no space to put them.

Link:
From '90s onward, police station has struggled with space - Norfolk Daily News

The space war between the US and China seems more apparent now as both the countries have chosen overlapping sites on the Moon where they would land their missions. Earlier in August, the US space agency NASA revealed 13 candidate sites for landing astronauts. Each of these sites, which are 15 by 15 kilometres, is located in the lunar south pole and will be used during Artemis 3 targeted for launch no earlier than 2025.

However, China has plans to take its lunar ambitions to the Moon a year earlier i.e in 2024 in 10 different locations which overlap with those chosen by NASA.

A report by Space News revealed that Chinese space expert Zhang He, who is also the Change-4 lunar mission commander authored a paper where he suggested 10candidate sites for Chinas Change-7 mission. Targeted for 2024, this uncrewed mission would consist of a lander-rover combination along with an orbiter, a relay satellite and a mini-flying detector.

(Landing sites chosen by NASA; Image: NASA)

Notably, these components might end up landing anywhere in the Shackleton, Haworth and Nobile craters of the Moons south pole. NASA said that the 13 locations it chose offerseveral advantages such as adequate lighting, proper landing conditions and the possibility of water-ice in the craters of the permanently shadowed regions. China, on the other hand, cited similar reasonsincluding the temperature condition, topography, and earth visibility.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has already admitted that the space race with China has already begun. Recently in July, Nelson even said that Beijing is planning a takeover of the Moon and its resources after it completes the construction of its own lunar space station by 2035. Citing China's agenda of hijacking the lunar surface, the NASA Chief had said that the US is "very concerned" about the former's ambitions.

Chinese space expert,Song Zhongping, on the other hand, said that the US is projecting China as an imaginary enemy and dismissed reports of Beijing's plan for a lunar takeover. He even alleged that the US ispromoting 'space colonialism' and lacks self-confidence.

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US & China now clash on the Moon with overlapping landing sites for lunar missions - Republic World

Physicists from Washington University in St. Louis are developing a new experiment envisioned for the International Space Station as part of NASAs Astrophysics Pioneers Program. The Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder for the International Space Station (TIGERISS) will be designed to measure the abundances of ultra-heavy galactic cosmic rays. Pioneers Program missions have a total cost cap of $20 million.

TIGERISS is an evolution of the TIGER and SuperTIGER balloon-borne instruments also created by scientists in Washington Universitys Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences over the past three decades.

TIGERISS has the unprecedented ability to measure galactic cosmic ray abundances with single-element resolution spanning the periodic table from boron to lead, said Brian Rauch, research associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, principal investigator for the TIGERISS program. At the end of the five-year mission, our transformational measurements will increase understanding on how the galaxy produces and distributes the elements.

TIGERISS also aims to strengthen and add to the new generation of leaders emerging in galactic cosmic ray instrumentation and analysis for future space-flight missions, said Rauch, who is a faculty fellow of the universitys McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Other Washington University team members include Wolfgang Zober, a physics PhD candidate, as science principal investigator for TIGERISS, with engineering support from Richard Bose and Izabella Pastrana, all in physics.

All stars exist in a delicate balance they need to put out enough energy to counteract their own gravity. That energy comes from fusing elements together to make heavier ones, including carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, which are important for life as we know it. But once a giant star tries to fuse iron atoms, the reaction doesnt generate enough power to fight gravity, and the stars core collapses.

This triggers an explosion known as a supernova, and shock waves cast out all of those heavy elements that had been made in the stars core. The explosion itself also creates heavy elements and accelerates them to nearly the speed of light particles that scientists dub cosmic rays.

But thats not the only way heavy atoms can form. When a super-dense remnant of a supernova called a neutron star collides with another neutron star, their cataclysmic merger also creates heavy elements.

TIGERISS wont be able to point out particular supernovae or neutron star collisions, but would add context as to how these fast-moving elements are accelerated and travel through the galaxy, Rauch said.

So how much do supernovae and neutron star mergers each contribute to making heavy elements? That is the most interesting question we can hope to address, Rauch said.

TIGERISS measurements are key to understanding how our galaxy creates and distributes matter, said John Krizmanic, TIGERISSs deputy principal investigator, based at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Contributing institutions on TIGERISS include NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center; Howard University; Pennsylvania State University; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Northern Kentucky University.

Commercial engineering company KBR Inc. also joined in the proposal, which was supported by Washington Universitys Research Development Office and the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. Aerospace company Boeing Co. contributed a letter of support.

Snagging a spot on the International Space Station has many advantages over flying an instrument on a long-duration scientific balloon, as Rauch has done in the past.

But those grueling balloon flights from Antarctica provided compelling science results that clearly demonstrated the utility of the basic experimental approach.

Rauch credits previous research by physicists Martin H. Israel and W. Robert Binns including both balloon-borne instruments and studies with space instruments for helping to establish Washington University as a leader in the study of cosmic rays.

On the International Space Station, the TIGER instrument family would soar to new heights. Without the interference from Earths atmosphere, the TIGERISS experiment could make higher-resolution measurements and pick up heavy particles that wouldnt be possible from a scientific balloon.

A perch on the space station would also allow for a larger physical experiment 3.2 feet (1 meter) on a side than could fit on a small satellite, increasing the potential size of the detector. And the experiment could last more than a year, compared to less than two months on a balloon flight. Researchers plan to be able to measure individual elements as heavy as lead, atomic number 82.

Compared with its predecessors, TIGERISS will have a greatly improved capability to definitively identify ultra-heavy galactic cosmic ray nuclei, Rauch said. This has been demonstrated in component accelerator tests at CERN, including using silicon strip detectors in place of scintillators.

TIGERISS joins four experiments in the Pioneers Program that are at a more advanced stage of development, having passed their initial review this year. Rauch is the institutional principal investigator for Washington University on one of these other Pioneers Program experiments, the PUEO program led by the University of Chicago.

Read more about TIGERISS on the NASA webpage.

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TIGERISS roars toward space station spot - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis - Washington University in St. Louis

The seven-member Expedition 67 crew poses for a portrait inside the International Space Stations Harmony module.

Vein scans and human research samples comprised the majority of the research schedule for the Expedition 67 crew members on Tuesday. Spacesuit work is also ongoing aboard the International Space Station as the cosmonauts prepare for a spacewalk.

Three astronauts took turns on Tuesday morning using the Ultrasound 2 device to scan each others neck, shoulder, and leg veins. NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins started the day inside the Columbus laboratory module with researchers on the ground remotely guiding the biomedical study. The ultrasound scans produce an echo that bounces off human tissue converting it to a video signal that is downlinked to Earth in real-time for analysis. Scientists view the imagery to observe how microgravity affects crew health.

The crew members also regularly collect their own blood, saliva, and urine samples, stowing the specimens in science freezers for later analysis. Shortly after Lindgren woke up on Tuesday, he spun his blood samples in a centrifuge for the Phospho-aging study to understand space-caused accelerated bone loss and muscle atrophy. ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti collected her blood and urine samples during the afternoon for future examination. Earlier, she documented her meals for a nutrition study then swapped material samples inside the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, a high-temperature research facility.

Cristoforetti and Watkins also spent time inside the U.S. Quest airlock servicing a U.S. spacesuit. The duo split their day on a variety of suit activities including swapping components and cleaning cooling loops. Hines spent his afternoon charging computer tablets and downloading security updates for the devices.

Commander Oleg Artemyev and Flight Engineer Denis Matveev spent the day activating and inspecting a pair of Orlan spacesuits, testing their communication systems, and performing leak checks. The two cosmonauts have been busy this week preparing for an upcoming spacewalk to prepare the European robotic arm for payload operations on the stations Russian segment. Flight Engineer Sergey Korsakov worked throughout Tuesday maintaining electronics systems and life support hardware inside the orbiting labs Russian modules.

Learn more about station activities by following thespace station blog,@space_stationand@ISS_Researchon Twitter, as well as theISS FacebookandISS Instagramaccounts.

Get weekly video highlights at:http://jscfeatures.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/

Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here:www.nasa.gov/subscribe

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Vein Scans, Blood Tests on Station Prolong Astronaut Health - NASA Blogs

Opinion The International Space Station is showing its age. It's older than a third of the population, over two and a half billion people who have never known a time without humans in orbit.

Bits and pieces of it keep going wrong, most recently the EVA spacesuits; Russia may or may not be about to bail; and it's more Red Dwarf than the Enterprise when it comes to space germs.

You thought it was difficult getting a cleaner to come to your apartment in the city? From one point of view, it's worn out, super-expensive to run, and is not contributing much to space exploration any more, and is soaking up far too much of space engineers' brain time.

Does that apply to any legacy technology you're familiar with? IT legacies don't make cool videos of the Earth from space or astronauts tumbling in microgravity, so they lose out heavily to the ISS on the public relations front. They won't be consuming 15 percent of a $22 billion budget [PDF] either.

The most important difference between the ISS and your line-of-business app still working gamely away in a virtualized Windows XP (which still has over 0.3 percent market share for heaven's sake) is that the ISS is a project designed to die. NASA is planning its demise in the next five to eight years [PDF].

Along with the headline stuff like scientific research and technology testing there are many thousands of results that are ours to enjoy the world also honors the work of the ISS because it benefits from the experience of long-term crewed missions. On the roadmap of space, the ISS bridges the misguided missile of the Shuttle and the return to the Moon and beyond.

When we next leave orbit outwards instead of inwards (the ISS will come crashing down into the Pacific Ocean, apparently), it'll be because of the legacy of the ISS.

Legacy IT could play a similarly honorable role in organizational long-term planning. It doesn't. Nobody thinks in those terms. If you're very, very lucky, the solitary nod to posterity may be some documentation that's been kept a bit up-to-date (you won't be very, very lucky).

Project lifecycles become more myth than management after the work's been done. If anyone asks at the start of a project: "What do we expect to learn by building and running this, and how do we migrate that knowledge onwards?" it's not part of tradition or general practice.

But the fact that such ideas seem more alien than 'Oumuamua is in part due to the chronic amnesia that afflicts corporates so desperate to reinvent that they forget biological evolution is nothing but refactored legacy.

It's also your fault, IT practitioners, and your determination to keep the science in computer science science-fiction. Take the agile methodology of software development.

The idea first took rigorous shape with rules and reasoning in 2000, the same year that the first crew boarded the ISS.

It recognized the problems of the strictly sequential project plan, it had good results that made agile a jargon term outside software, and it fed into DevOps and the cloud. You can easily find many discussions of how well it did these things, whether its time has passed, and what strengths and weaknesses have been exposed over two decades. What you cannot find is an attempt to systematically analyze what agile has taught us about software engineering and project management, in its own terms or in the context of the total history of software.

Our skills in science and technology don't progress linearly, with each step an incremental good. Many fashionable ideas look good but are rarely mentioned in polite society after they fail to match the hype. But do we learn from these failures through a shared narrative?

Software, too, has its fashion failures: Java everywhere, anyone? And the unfashionable can also rise (JavaScript, yo). But what does this mean for the future?

It's not that there's any lack of discussion about every aspect of the fabric of our digital world; it's that there's no sense of coherent intellectual analysis. It's like Anglophone politics, where any tradition of intellectual analysis has been abandoned in favor of the hot take.

Even something as fascinating and profound as the co-dependent rise of open source and the internet has received less academic attention than the prehistory of ant parasitology. Yet there's no part of commerce or culture untouched by the former.

That the ISS could be built and run with a probable life of 30 years is because the science, technology, and engineering live up to their identity as disciplines. That's how a legacy of enrichment and progress happens.

That the term legacy in IT is a mark of shame and technical debt is because we've shirked the brainwork of making it a proper discipline. As we move deeper into the 21st century with all the problems that bad digital can bring, it's our responsibility to make it one of the great human endeavors. Serious intent is no crime. Fiery death from above is not an option.

Originally posted here:
The International Space Station will deorbit in glory. How's your legacy tech doing? - The Register

The space center is expected to open by 2023 (courtesy Interstellar Dreams)

In the near-future, Reston will have an educational space center to call its own.

Interstellar Dreams, a project through The Pearl Project Institute for Innovation in STEM literacy, is actively scouting for a 40,000-square-foot space center in Reston. The center, which is expected to open by next year, will include training and simulations in real-world and virtual learning environments.

The Reston center will be preceded by a smaller prototype set to open Sept. 10 at George Mason Universitys College of Science Research Hall in Fairfax, according to a press release.

We are looking for stars to get us to the stars, said Robin McDougal, founder and CEO of Interstellar Dreams, a nonprofit focused on nurturing future STEM professionals. Building a Space Center is a needed tool to help inspire, educate, and train emerging and current workersthat are reflective of our whole population to ensure we are ready to explore the universe. We plan to start here in Northern Virginia where this industry is booming.

The company is raising $5 million to build a mission command, space station and planetary habitat. These features will have floor to ceiling LED screens and equipments. Visitors can come for an hour or a day to be in the environment, and mission commanders will lead groups in exercised and simulations.

The project will primarily be funded by donations, sponsorships and memberships.

McDougal is a former Fairfax County Public Schools advanced academic educator and describes herself as a STEM literary advocate.

The announcement was made yesterday (Monday) in the backdrop of NASAs moon launch of Artemis I. The launch was delayed that day.

Read the original:
Educational space center to launch by 2023 in Reston - FFXnow

As Artemis 1 prepares for its maiden launch with the goal of putting astronauts back on the Moons surface within the next few years, the next question is how will astronauts live and survive its surface? Will we constantly ferry all the necessary supplies such as water and food from Earth, or could astronauts learn to survive on their own? These are questions that a discipline known as ISRU hopes to answer both now and in the years to come. But what is ISRU, and how will it help advance human space exploration as we begin to slowly venture farther away from the only home weve ever known?

ISRU stands for in situ resource utilization where in situ basically means in place or from the original place, said Bailey Burns, a System Engineer with Paragon Space Development Corporation, who also received a Master of Science in Space Resources from the Colorado School of Mines. This basically is talking about using the resources that are there. This is a really big topic as we talk about space exploration because we cant bring everything with us from Earth when we go to space. One of the largest reasons for this is the gravity well of Earth. To escape Earths gravity takes a lot of rocket power. They are estimating that it takes about $10,000 to put 1 kg into space. The short answer is ISRU is about living off of whats in space to provide a permanent and sustainable human presence in space.

Dr. Norman Wagner, who is the Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair in Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware, believes that both landing pads and habitats are the two most important aspects the Artemis crewed missions should focus on when they first get to the Moon. He says this is due to rocket exhaust being able to create projectiles, while radiation and thermal shielding also being necessary or we will be living underground.

As stated, the Artemis astronauts will require both food and water to survive on the Moon, but how will they get both without constant resupply from Earth? A recent study explored how Moon dust can be turned into cement to build structures such as landing pads, but what about water and food? One possible avenue is growing it in the lunar regolith itself, which a recent study attempted with lunar regolith returned from the Apollo missions with marginal success. For water, the south pole of the Moon has been designated as a possible landing site for Artemis 3 astronauts due to its water ice content deep within some of its craters, specifically Shackleton Crater.

While the Moon lacks an atmosphere, it is currently hypothesized that pockets of water ice might exist within the depths of these craters due to the lack of sunlight reaching it. This is because the Moons axial tilt is only about 5 degrees relative to its orbit, meaning there are places at both poles that either receive constant sunlight, or none at all. Water is by far the most important need for humans, and water ice found on the Moon can not only be used for drinking and bathing, but can also be electrolyzed to make oxygen, as they currently do in the International Space Station.

In terms of Artemis, I do believe what were doing right now is the best approach, said Burns. We really need to figure out how to utilize water best. After all, we are talking about having a human space presence and humans can only go three days without water. This makes this one of the largest concerns for humans in space. I think the next big areas will be figuring out how to use lunar regolith as a building material such as concrete here on Earth and utilizing helium 3 as a clean energy source.

While Artemis astronauts will only be a few days from Earth in case something goes wrong, future astronauts going to Mars wont be so lucky. Its a six-month journey each way depending on the alignment of Earth and Mars, so ISRU will play an even bigger role there than on the Moon.

ISRU is going to be really beneficial to the Moon and Mars, said Burns. Weve already talked about a few of the resources we can find there. Another one for Mars specifically is the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now. It would be better if it had oxygen for us like Earth but having tons of CO2 is the next best thing. That means we dont have to transport oxygen from Earth to Mars, which is really expensive, we just need to work on technology such as MOXIE which turns CO2 back into oxygen for us to breathe. Of course, with a carbon byproduct as well. The reason all of this is super beneficial, as I mentioned, its because it means we dont have to bring these things from Earth, and we can have truly sustainable space civilizations on the Moon and Mars.

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

Lead Image: Artist concept of Artemis astronauts on the Moon. (Credit: NASA)

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What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration? - Universe Today